SIGGRAPH Day 3. Swag day!

My third day at SIGGRAPH got off to a rushed start. Was going to go early to get a poster from Pixar but I got my schedule mixed up. Turns out the Rango talk was at 9. Ack! So I was running late for that talk and ended up missing out on my first swag item.

The Rango talk was awesome. Especially for the shear volume of work they did on all the character designs. They really didn't want to make another "cute " animated film. So designing more, for lack of a better word, ugly characters and really dirtying them up, was more to their liking. The research on Western films was extensive and on how sand is affected by movement to create extensive dust in the atmospheres. They really worked hard to get that same atmospheric feeling. Also the problems that Cowboy hats posed for lighting in CG. The shadows that hats cast can be quite difficult. In live action the hat causes a dark shadow and light reflecting off the ground below creates a fill light to light up the characters face. But recreating that in the computer doesn't quite work in the same way. They actually found that changing the angle of the key light, so that the main shadow from the hat, puts a strike diagonal line across the characters faces worked best.

Getting to the goodies! Pics and videos: 

Walking Tea Pot Toy from Pixar! The only studio that lines formed for!

Swag covered my bed

Double Negative

Bungie worked on HALO

ILM

LucusFilm markers, they had a board where you could draw your signature

Intel Stress Balls

My Bling (courtesy of Autodesk)

More Bling from Autodesk, Animation Mentor, and Disney

Pixar Sticker

Pixar Recruitment Info

Animation Mentor T-Shirt and Info Packets

Animation Mentor rub on Tattoos

Blender

Free 3D Head Scans, They're e-mailing it to me in 1 week, I'll upload it when I get it.

3D Mouse! It was so cool as a navigation tool in Maya.

Disney Swag. The Middle book is actually a sketch book.

Huge free T-shirt from Framestore

free bag!

T-Pot Box

Each Teapot has a unique number!

 

 Tea pot in Action!

 After Swag mania, Mai and I went for lunch before the Smurfs talk at 2. Sony Imageworks talk extensively about the character designs and the difficulties they had in taking 2D characters into 3D, and no just into the computer but to bring them into the real world and making them look like they were apart of the real world. First off, was a huge back and forth between them and the client when it came to the color of Smurfs. The client wanted the original smurf blue to come into the movie. Unfortunately, that blue was just not workable in a real life environment. Mainly because it wouldn't react well with changing light. As lights changed the blue needed to change with it to make it believable. So there was a lot of back and forth between Sony and the clients. 

One thing that was so interesting was the lighting pipeline they designed. Combining 5 different technologies and programs to create this awesome film. Without delving too deep into the specifics, I'll just talk about one cool thing that they did do, that has changed how HDRIs are utilized. A new technology from Spheron, is a full HDRI camera. Instead of picking an angle, taking your shots, turning to another angle, taking the shots, and so on. You plunk down this new camera, start it up, and it spins around taking all the shots you need for a full 360 view of a set. And the best part is it composites it too, you don't need to edited in post. Basically just file extraction and go. What the guys at Sony were able to do with this new system, in conjunction with their other systems, was to use the HDRIs to create CG lights in the exact same position as they are in the HDRIs. Because the HDRI camera is so accurate, triangulating the position for these CG cameras is easy sauce. That just amazes me how quickly technologies evolve. After being in my program for over a year, some of the stuff I've already learn has become obsolete! Exciting, but scary at the same time.

Well that about wraps up Day 3. Tomorrow is the last day :(. SAD FACE! I had so much fun, but it'll be good to get back to my demo reel. I have felt a bit guilty in taking this week off :(.